Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Tribeca 2013 Critic’s Notebook #2: Black (Out)Rage
So I’ll get right to it — the only truly great film I’ve seen at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival is Jason Osder’s searing Let the Fire Burn. A found-footage marvel with no narration and sparse title cards, it dives into the maelstrom that was the Philadelphia police’s tragic raid on the black separatist group MOVE’s West Philadelphia compound in 1985, during which the home, where 13 men, women and children lived, was fired upon 10,000 times, doused with unspeakable amounts of water and then finally firebombed, an event which led to nearly 70 other homes in the surrounding working […]
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Tribeca 2013 Critic’s Notebook #1: Sea Change
It’s easy to get a bad rap in New York. It’s a town that holds grudges, where easy assumptions die hard and critical whispers ricochet from person to person. For a long time it was difficult for the Tribeca Film Festival to escape the stigma of its early years, when it remained spiritually connected to the aftermath of 9/11 and its original purpose while not having yet evolved into a truly satisfying event. Back then it was brash, unwieldy and overlong, its ambitions outstripping necessity and good taste. These qualities often overshadowed what it did well, and even as the festival […]
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The Rocket, The Kill Team Nab Top Awards at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival
Kim Mourdant’s The Rocket and Dan Krauss’s The Kill Team picked up the top World Narrative and World Documentary prizes at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival’s closing ceremonies tonight at downtown’s Conrad Hotel. Both awards come with a $25,000 cash prize. Among the other awards, Whitewash director Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais won Best New Narrative Director while Oxyana‘s Sean Dunne picked up the Best New Documentary Director award. Sam Fleischner’s New York-shot, Sandy-set Stand Clear of the Closing Doors was given a Special Jury Mention, as was Dunne’s Oxyana. Another Sandy-themed project, Sandy Stories, won a new Bombay Sapphire-sponsored award for transmedia […]
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The Bermuda International Film Festival Celebrates Sweet Sixteen
Sweet 16 was the theme of this year’s Bermuda International Film Festival, though the vibe seemed more smooth continuation than a coming of age. Like its March 2012 edition, this April BIFF screened an international selection of prestige flicks (that those of us who don’t live on an enchanted island in the middle of the Atlantic had mostly seen by Oscar time). In addition to opening night’s Ginger & Rosa, Bermudians could catch everything from The Act of Killing and West of Memphis, to Rust and Bone and Amour. Not to mention Laurence Anyways, Beyond the Hills, Chicken with Plums, […]
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Tribeca Film Institute’s Interactive Conference
There’s no good way to summarize the plethora of information presented last Saturday at TFI Interactive, a full-day conference held, for the second time, during the Tribeca Film Festival. Organized by the omnipresent Ingrid Kopp (who was recently interviewed by the MIT Open Documentary Lab), the day took place at the IAC Building in lower Manhattan, not far from most of the festival’s screenings and the Storyscapes interactive exhibits that Kopp also curated. Over 20 presentations covered dozens of individual projects, discussed entities like Kickstarter, the NFB, and IDFA DocLabs, and included panel discussions on creating adventure video games (think The […]
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Storyscapes: Tribeca Goes Interactive
This image is from Empire Uncut, part of the Star Wars Uncut project and one of the five projects at the Tribeca Film Festival’s first juried exhibit of interactive video projects, which ran this week at the Bombay Sapphire House of Imagination on Varick Street. TFI has been supporting digital, transmedia, and multimedia projects for years through programs like its New Media Fund and hackathons, and now TFI’s Director of Digital Initiatives Ingrid Kopp (who was recently interviewed by Filmmaker) has found a way to bring some projects into a physical space to coincide with the film festival in lower […]
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25 Picks for the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival
In the world of film festivals, “12” isn’t a particularly notable number. “Ten” — connoting if not institutional status than at least permanent residence — has come and gone. So too the after party of “11.” “Twelve” should just be rolling along, business as usual, dependent more on the quality of that year’s cinema than anything else. So, while it would be a stretch to say that Tribeca has reinvented itself for its twelfth edition, which opens today, I can’t help but note that something seems pleasantly different. Maybe it’s the lack of celebrity bloat — gone are the tin-ear […]
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2013 Cannes Film Festival Lineup Announced
Yesterday, a relatively convincing hoax lineup was “leaked” to a few websites, which presented a tantalizing vision of what Cannes 2013 had to offer. This morning, however, the real slate has been unveiled and its actually even more stacked with big name directors and exciting films. In competition, there are the new titles from U.S. directors Steven Soderbergh (his HBO “non-film” on Liberace), Alexander Payne, James Gray and the Coen brothers, with Europe represented by films from auteurs such as Paolo Sorrentino, François Ozon, Arnaud Desplechin, Abdellatif Kechiche (The Secret of the Grain), Nicolas Winding Refn, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Roman Polanski. From […]
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Big Shot Movie Club Launches a “How To” Series at Spectacle
Our friends at the Big Shot Movie Club are in the midst of a screening series close to our hearts at Spectacle in Williamsburg. Titled “How To,” it’s a series of “practical films…. Films that teach us skills and examine the process of how things are made. In this series, we learn how to make ends meet, how to feed ourselves, and how people persist, day in and day out, in this complex world.” The films include the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman (April 17 and 27); Agnes Varda’s Daguerreotypes (April 17); and Jiayin Liu’s Oxhide II (April 27). Check out the […]
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The Full Frame Film Festival, Part Three
Several of the films from this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival dealt with themes of community. Two films in particular that focused on question of community were Patrick Creadon’s If You Build It and Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s Remote Area Medical. In both cases, we are introduced to both the pleasures and the complexities of providing resources — medical or educational — to rural communities that have been neglected in recent years. If You Build It depicts the efforts of Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller to introduce a design-oriented curriculum to rural Bertie County, North Carolina, and to […]
